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If you need to be Hospitalized…

02.05.2011 at 7:37 pm

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If you think you need to be hospitalized, you will need to go to an Emergency Department of your choice. Our patients are admitted through the Emergency Department at either Eisenhower or Desert Regional after evaluation by the Emergency physicians. The reason for Emergency department evaluation is the criteria for admission changes from hospital to hospital and also by bed and nurse availability. The Emergency physicians have the best insight as to whether your medical problem meets criteria for admission and hence having the best chance of being covered by your insurance. This does not mean however that your hospital admission will be covered by your insurance and it is your responsibility to know what your insurance covers. Hospitalization is enormously expensive beyond what most patients can even believe. An example is a recent patient of ours that had a routine uncomplicated appendectomy with a 16 hour hospital stay costing a whopping $41,000.00 at DRMC.

If you go to the Emergency department and they determine you should be admitted to the hospital, you will want to tell them that your primary care physician is Dr. Frank Arian. If you are at DRMC ask to be admitted to Dr. Arian’s in-house hospitalist group. We have an agreement with DRMC’s hospitalist group that they will do our hospital work. If you are at Eisenhower, you will ask to be admitted to HMG which is the hospitalist medical group at Eisenhower that we also have arranged to care for our hospitalized patients.

If you are wondering why Dr. Arian does not currently do hospital work, please go to the philosophy section of this web page for an expanded discussion of this issue.

An important word of warning. If you are admitted to the hospital and for whatever reason you want to leave before you are officially discharged, this is known as leaving against medical advice which we call AMA. IF you leave AMA your insurance will not pay for ANY of your hospital bills and you will have to eat the entire amount. The trick is getting the hospitalist to discharge you safely without signing out AMA. Enter into negotiations with the hospitalist before just signing out. It could save you a king’s ransom. Consider your decision very carefully before you ultimately sign out AMA.

Below are the contact numbers and addresses for the two hospitals that we recommend.